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Someday, people are truly going to respect what Jimmie Johnson has done and is continuing to do. His dominance over the past four years has been unbelievable and his four consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championships are record setting.
Let’s not forget, too, that this is not the 1950s and 1960s when there were only a few qualified drivers out there and winning among them seemed to be a weekly event.
No. This is a day and age when the technology and the ability of those who roll out onto the track each week make even the weakest of drivers competitive for at least a portion of the race.
When it’s all said and done, Johnson will go down as one of the greatest drivers of all time. Sure, he pretty much had his fourth championship locked up before even starting his engine on Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and sure, he only had to finish 25th or better to make everything official. But Johnson went about this year’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup like a champion from the very beginning. He won, and he raced like he needed to be in the top five at the end of every race.
He overcame and then held off a tough Mark Martin, the sentimental favorite to unseat him as champ, and even put a decent amount of points space between the two of them.
Also, no one else in the Chase field ever stood a chance once Johnson climbed back into first-place either. Johnson is just built for the Chase, and his record in Chase races speaks for itself.
In the four years that Johnson has won the Sprint Cup title, he’s raced in 40 Chase races and won 12. He’s also recorded 24 top-five finishes and 31 top 10s. He’s led 2,756, or 21.5 percent, of all Chase laps during that stretch.
Even more impressive, Johnson has finished fifth or better in the final championship points standings each year since joining the Sprint Cup full-time in 2002, and, at age 34, he is already more than halfway to owning the all-time championships record currently shared by Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt at seven and is tied with teammate Jeff Gordon, who also has four.
Before it is all said and done, Johnson may just be considered the best. Heck, he may just be the best ever right now.
NEW ROLE FOR RAY?
Former crew chief and car owner Ray Evernham might just want to get back into the day-to-day activities of running a NASCAR race team.
OK, so maybe he isn’t coming right out and saying as much, but if his comments to NASCAR.com over the weekend are any indication, we may just be seeing the former voice in Gordon’s head back atop a pit box before long.
“Unfortunately for me, there are a lot of legal things going on right now. And there will be more legal things to come,” Evernham, who is a minority stockholder in Richard Petty Motorsports and also serves as a color analyst for ESPN TV race broadcasts, said. “I’m not 100 percent sure (what I’ll be doing next year). Right now I have a contract on the table from ESPN — and I love working for ESPN. I have a blast with what I do there.
“We’ll have to see. I’m not going to say that I’ll never be back over here. I just don’t know in what capacity.”
Evernham’s minority ownership stake in RPM came as part of a merger deal between Petty Enterprises and Gillett Evernham Motorsports, of which Evernham was a minority owner with current businessman George Gillett.
He’s told a number of media that he would like out of his current role at RPM, which has recently announced yet more merger plans, this time with Yates Racing, adding that he’d like to be more involved with the racing aspect of an organization.
He currently has a non-compete clause that he signed as part of the GEM deal that needs some clarification now that GEM ceases to exist. When asked by NASCAR.com about the non-compete clause and what it means after all the merger deals, Evernham would only say that “those are all the things that we’re working on.”
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